Susan Meiselas
SUSAN MEISELAS (b. 1948 Baltimore, MD) received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.A. in visual education from Harvard University. Her first major photographic essay focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New England country fairs in the 1970s. She photographed the carnivals during three consecutive summers while teaching photography in the New York public schools. A selection of this series, which came to be published and known as Carnival Strippers, was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art in June of 2000.
Meiselas joined Magnum Photos in 1976 and has worked as a freelance photographer ever since. She is best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America, which have been published widely throughout the world.
Meiselas has had solo exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Her work is included in national and international collections. Honorary awards of recognition include: the Robert Capa Gold Medal for “outstanding courage and reporting” by the Overseas Press Club for her work in Nicaragua (1979); the Leica Award for Excellence (1982); the Engelhard Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art (1985); the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University for her coverage of Latin America (1994); and the Hasselblad Foundation Photography prize (1994). In 1992, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. Susan Meiselas lives and works in New York.
